The blog of Brian Kirsten

 

Understanding the Credit Crisis...

Or why the subprime meltdown could mean a world of hurt for us Americans.

As is often the case with innovations, though, there was soon too much of a good thing. Those same global investors, flush with cash from Asia’s boom or rising oil prices, demanded good returns. Wall Street had an answer: subprime mortgages.

Because these loans go to people stretching to afford a house, they come with higher interest rates — even if they’re disguised by low initial rates — and thus higher returns. The mortgages were then sliced into pieces and bundled into investments, often known as collateralized debt obligations, or C.D.O.’s (a term that appeared in this newspaper only three times before 2005, but almost every week since last summer). Once bundled, different types of mortgages could be sold to different groups of investors.

Can’t Grasp Credit Crisis? Join the Club (Link courtesy of BoingBoing)

Filed under  //   Financial   Investing   Money   Ranting  
Posted March 20, 2008
 

Using Mint

I recently decided to register for Mint (the financial website not the one the measures traffic) because it came highly recommended in one of the many blogs I read during the day (I don't recall which one...sorry). I knew little about the site, just that it was supposed to munge together all your finances to give you a better idea about how financially screwed you really are. I initially thought that recommendations for the Mint website were some sort of terrible joke. After registering I tried for most of the afternoon to get any account information into the system with no luck. The site was tremendously slow and unresponsive. I later came to realize that Mint had just won the TechCrunch40 award, so that would explain the site's slow response time. I returned a few days later after the furor ran down, hoping they'd spent their $50,000 winnings on some additional servers. Returning to Mint's website, it seemed a bit more responsive and I was finally able to add several accounts to the system. The concept is fairly easy, after registering you search to see if your bank or credit card company appears on the list that Mint can interact with. If you do find your bank or credit card provider, you then enter in your login information and several minutes later (or in my case hours later) Mint connects with your accounts and downloads your transactions. I was fairly surprised with the sheer number of companies Mint claims to be able to talk to. I didn't have troubles with a majority of my accounts, Mint still can't connect to a particular credit card of mine (although they claim they can) and for some reason Mint still can't talk to my Etrade bank account (which Mint also claims they can talk to).

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Filed under  //   Financial   Money  
Posted October 4, 2007